Mozilla joins mobile Linux foundation

Mozilla has joined big mobile market players including Verizon, NTT DoCoMo, Samsung, LG, Motorola, Panasonic, Orange, McAfee, AMD and long list of others, as a member of the LiMo Foundation, a non-profit organization that aims to deliver a mobile Linux distribution as the cornerstone of its members’ mobile applications and devices.

LiMo, which was founded on January last year, has already delivered a first release of its mobile Linux platform which even powers a couple of Motorola headsets: Razr 2 and Rokr E8.

On the announcement, Jay Sullivan, a mobile Mozilla developer commented “We intend to participate actively in all aspects of the LiMo platform that relate to Web browsing, Web widgets/runtimes and security.  We also plan to share our experiences with building successful open-source communities.”

Mozilla also has some level of experience with running its software on mobile devices: MicroB, is a deeply modified version of Firefox that runs on Nokia internet tables.

Minimo, was another Firefox-based browser optimized to run on Windows Mobile operating system. It was dropped later last year following last the announcement that Mozilla would deliver a true Firefox Mobile (code name Fennec).

Finally, Joey, is a Mozilla Labs project that allows information exchange between Firefox (with the Joey extension) and a registered mobile device running Joey, a mobile Java application.

LiMo is in many ways a competitor to Google’s Android and Nokia sponsored maemo, both of which also aim to provide a mobile framework based on Linux. maemo however is specifically oriented to power Nokia Internet tablets.